How to upgrade from Office 2010 to Office 365 (Office 2013)

I am an IT consultant and I use my personal laptop for work with many clients. I am the happy owner of Microsoft Office Professional 2010 that I have configured nicely and used with no difficulty for many years. My set up is

Since I am advising my clients on their Office 365 upgrades it is necessary that I test it on myself. I do not foresee any problems installing Office 365 on corporate kit. This is all well managed. However Office 365 Pro Plus allows our employees to install Office 365 applications on upto 5 personal devices. This is likely to cause lots of problems and hence my testing it on myself.

The upgrade to Office 2013 is very simple. You simply login to Office 365 and download the installer. This does a “side by side” install and Office 365 “runs in a virtual machine” on your computer so there is no chance of DLL conflicts.

How to do an install

All the applications except Outlook 2013 install fine. However templates are not transferred. You must manually update each application with your existing template directory.

Outlook 2013 is the most complicated “upgrade” because it has to copy the configuration from Outlook 2010 and this may include add-ins and several accounts.

I ran the installation and everything went well until it tried to configure Outlook 2013. Eventually I rebooted and although Outlook 2013 would run it was grindingly slow. I won’t bore you with the details of my eight hours of diagnostics but cut to the chase.

If it does not work for you then this procedure probably will.

How to fix slow or broken Outlook 2013 after an upgrade

On a fast network, preferably fixed wiring otherwise strong Wi-Fi

Disable Antivirus

Disable any backup jobs that might run during the installation (eg. Acronis or ShadowProtect)

Disable any personal add-ins to Outlook 2010 (for me this was PDF, CompanionLink and Naturally Speaking)

Open Control Panel > Mail (Microsoft Outlook 2013) and delete the profile

Create a new profile

Add your primary Exchange Account

Make sure that you copy across the “Advanced Setting” for any Exchange account you use outside the firewall.

Start Outlook 2013 and it should download your messages and work at least as fast as Outlook 2010

Add the next mail account and test, repeat

Reboot your PC

Open Outlook 2013 and enable the first add-in, test for speed

Restart Outlook 2013

If Outlook complains the add-in was slow and buggy. Decide if you believe it. If you don’t choose to the option to force Outlook to run the add-in at startup.

Repeat the process of enabling add-ins, testing and restarting and forcing to run

The goal is complete

Enable Antivirus

Enable backup jobs

The goal is complete

How to fix general slowness caused by high cpu use by OneDrive

After my installation OneDrive stuck on 25% cpu use. Rebooting did not help. High CPU use in OneDrive is always due to a synchronisation problem however no sync problems were reported. I reinstalled OneDrive from the Microsoft website and it then reported 5 sync problems. I fixed these by opening and editing the files and saving them. This fixed the high cpu use problem.

How to fix general slowness caused by backup jobs

The installation of Microsoft Office is going to cause a large incremental backup (11 GB). This can be sufficient to “down” your machine if the backup windows is during working hours (eg continuous protection products such as Acronis or ShadowProtect).

To fix this problem suspend (or kill) any backup jobs and then turn the laptop onto full power and run the job overnight. Verify it has finished before starting work.

I use Dragon Naturally Speaking with Microsoft Office. The new installation triggered Microsoft Security Essentials to aggressively scan Dragon whenever I started it up and used it. This took 20 to 60% of CPU and made the machine unusable. The fix is to add the Dragon directory to Microsoft Security Essentials excluded locations.

It took a long time but I think that I now have an upgraded and working system. Armed with this knowledge you should be able to complete an upgrade in a couple of hours.

— Update 2015-07-17 —

Office templates are not migrated. This is bad because they have a lot of very valuable information in them. Microsoft’s fix is detailed here. I need these to be backed up so I have now put them in OneDrive > Office Templates